Viruses from the dawn of time

It was a simpler time of black screens and white text, perhaps green or orange depending on your flavour of monochrome, where ancient viruses roamed the world of 3.5" floppies and MS-DOS. These were not the viruses of today that do their best to sneak onto your machine and hide their shame from the user as best they could, these were created by people who wanted to show off their skills by letting you know something funny was going on. Wired talked with Daniel White who has amassed a huge amount of information on malware that covers decades of computer abuse, with a YouTube video for each and every one. While some may bring back horrible memories of your fights with old viral enemies the ones from the MS-DOS era which were mostly benign and very entertaining may bring a smile to some older geeks faces.

They did leave out one of my favourites, jump to 2:15 in the video below to see CASCADE.COM in action.

"But while the recent Windows worms may be the most familiar, another subset of White’s archive is even more interesting. The viruses he’s collected from the MS-DOS era are malware from a simpler time–a glimpse into a largely forgotten and surprisingly creative subculture."